The answer to this question can be found in Chapter
Twelve, which is when John the Savage reads Romeo and Juliet to
Helmholtz, with something of a mixed reception. Interestingly, in spite of Helmhholtz's
openness to new ideas, he shows that he is unable to escape the way that he himself is a
product of socialisation of his age, as his shown by the way that Juliet protests
against her parents forcing her to marry Paris, to which he responds with
"uncontrollable guffawing." Note what the narrator tells us about Helmholtz's response
to these lines:
The mother and father (grotesque obscenity)
forcing the daughter to have someone she didn't want! And the idiotic girl not saying
that she was having someone else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In
its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly
comic.
So, although Helmholtz
is able to appreciate Shakespeare as a genius of "emotional engineering," at the same
time, his conditioning makes him unable to appreciate Shakespeare in the same way that
John is able to appreciate Shakespeare, as notions such as love and loyalty are
completely absent from his experience.
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